apartheid

South African President Jacob Zuma, in his State of the Union address, promised to speed the pace of land redistribution and housing construction to replace the country’s urban shantytowns, but nearly 20 years after the end of apartheid, the number of people living in shantytowns has doubled and the state violence to evict the residents has increased.

​South African born professor Sean Jacobs, who teaches at New York City's New School for Social Research, spoke to KPFA about the Marikana miners' strike and massacre. He said that the miners will be even worse off once it's over, unless there's an unlikely groundswell of support in South Africa. South Africans perceived apartheid as a legal system, he said, when it was really an economic system, which continues and will be more difficult to abolish.